cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/625644

Personally use this tool on a daily basis. YMMV wrt the frontends provided, but I use it as my daily driver to help me evade Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube’s tracking of everything I do.

  • ram@lemmy.caOP
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    2 years ago

    While it’ll be on an instance-by-instance basis for use of your data, Lemmy and kbin both run without clientside Javascript, which eliminates most fingerprinting techniques. Do note, however, that individual instances of Lemmy may have their own modifications to the codebase. SysAdmins could of course implement something like this in their own instances, as well as other features and tweaks. It’s not a monolith. But it’s definitely more privacy-friendly than Reddit, if that’s what we’re using as our baseline.

    Of course you can always spin your own instance or an instance with friends, that gives you full control of your data and how it’s used.

    • whitehouses@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I saw on reddit a post about lemmy tracks and stores everything forever even if you delete it. Is that true?

      • ram@lemmy.caOP
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        2 years ago

        Closest I can think of is that if you delete your account, public posts may remain on other instances. This is one of the hard parts for federation and decentralisation to handle. The alternative would be to verify every action that occurs on every server across the entire federation, but then we’re looking at exploding performance costs comparable to crypto.

        I don’t off-hand know if it stays this way forever, or if it eventually fixes itself.

        But Lemmy’s codebase as-is doesn’t track anything you haven’t purposely submitted to it, namely your authentication details, subscribed-to communities, and posts, and these are deleted on a best-efforts basis upon account deletion.

        • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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          2 years ago

          Lemmy edits over your posts by default so that remote instances delete them too.

          Also if you live in the EU and an instance is refusing to delete your personal information, you can probably report them to your data regulator. Could get them fined if they’re in the EU, or the EU could order EU-based instances to defederate from them.

      • fedi :fediverse:@masto.ai
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        2 years ago

        @whitehouses this is the sort of thing the big tech companies do… and then they claim that the fediverse sites(lemmy, mastodon etc) do it, in order to scare people from joining the fediverse.

        The tracking that facebook, twitter etc do is not the way that fediverse sites operate. It is not a for profit space.

        [this is posted from a mastodon account]